"I tried to install on a laptop, and it didn't work."
Windows and Linux get more similar every day... Wouldn't it be ironic if it was because the laptop manufacturer didn't care about any compatibility issues other than getting their "designed for Windows XP" certification.
"Since I had never heard of the artist until Google used an interpretation of her art as its logo, this seems like it would be a good thing for artists."
or set your user-agent string to be a screen-reader or braille machine (and then use the US federal disability laws to make their life difficult when they ban you)
"One woman recently came to light in the national press [for driving whilst applying makeup]"
Interesting story, not least because it shows that people who've been banned (after drink-driving, no less) are still on the roads and driving around.
This person only got caught because a policeman happened to notice her doing something stupid, but it makes you wonder how many of the other drivers are banned but ignoring it.
Paul Graham is wrong when he says, "if you are against software patents, you are against all patents".
While it does make some sense ("why should the first person to make a hammer be the only person allowed to make a hammer") it misses the obvious point that in hardware, you don't give away an infinte number of products for free.
That kind of messes-up the licensing issues, when you have something which can be duplicated and redistributed at no cost by anyone who receives it.
Paul Graham seems to be approaching from the POV of a startup company which just wants to exist long enough to sell the company in 3 years or less, with the fallback option of hiring lawyers, paying licenses, or cross-licensing if necessary once they have the money and patents to do so.
Many of the people on slashdot are doing something very different, trying to create a piece of software which will last essentially forever, be free for anyone to use without restriction, and with little or no "legal maintenance"
i.e. if you put down your GPL project, you expect to be able to come back to it in 20 years and find it still legally usable - that exposes one of the big problems with patents, that they make it so easy to destroy useful work.
So the essay seems like one answer of very limited-scope, to the wrong question, for most of us here.
"IOW, Clinton did this, not Bush. Remember Carnivore?"
What makes you think it's the president's idea? Surely the NSA does what the NSA does, regardless of the person who's theoretically supposed to be telling them what to do.
People who've watched Yes Minister will know what I mean.
Or if you've been watching the UK Home Office do its "ID cards" thing regardless of which figurehead is nominally in charge of the department. People used to say that it's all David Blunkett's fault, until he left and his old department of civil servants carried on doing exactly the same thing with a new "leader".
People blame one president for what the FBI, NSA, DHS, etc. are up to, and when that president leaves, it all continues as if nothing had changed. Aren't government bureaucracies the same, the world over?
If browsers started displaying metadata at the top of the page when rendering it, maybe people would get more embarassed about 1800-keyword pages and start using the tags sensibly...
Option 4: your automated fax machine recognises the blacklisted number, answers and hangs up, then automatically composes a new fax to whatever government representative you have in that godforsaken country, saying "I just received an unwelcome fax from w, this is the x'th junk fax in y days which has cost my business $z. Could you please campaign for laws to reduce the number of junk faxes I get?"
"And that's the beauty of DRM: it will allow companies to continue to profit from their works even long after copyright has expired."
Which is why, since DRM publishers don't uphold the "public domain" end of the copyright bargain, neither should their readers uphold their "monopoly on copying" which was once used as payment for publishers' contributions to the public domain.
They want to play hardball? Fine. Make anything with DRM legal to copy the moment it's released - let publishers rely on encryption rather than law if that's what they want.
Re:Who are *you* calling "a moron in a hurry"?
on
On Apple vs Apple
·
· Score: 1
"The word "moron" fell out of medical use, as did imbecile and idiot because the term started getting abused by lay people."
"if everyone aims at the bullseye, then the distribution I would expect would very much indicate where the bullseye is!"
So in our analogy, the bullseye is the truth, and the million darts are public opinion as represented by blogs. We think that by analysing enough opinions, we can do some statistics, find a peak or average, and discover the truth.
Problem is, imagine mapping public opinion onto the bullseye problem. The target would be obscured behind dense smoke, and there would be several brightly illuminated fake targets in other locations within the smoke.
It would be easy for someone outside the U.S. to joke that many of those fake targets are well off to the right hand side, but that's just an example.
As someone else mentioned, it all depends on whether people can recognise an idea that sounds plausible, even if that differs from the prevailing opinion, and espouse that view themselves. Such open-mindedness would only find local maxima (unless people did serious amounts of research before believing something), but at least it would narrow down the millions of views to a few clumps around valid ideas, which lets you read them all and judge.
But if people read them all, they might converge on just the correct answer, which implies that it's possible to agree on a correct answer. If it's not, then surely you stand no more chance than the crowd does, in choosing between the viewpoints correctly. Ultimately, you might end up with the best answer which fits your opinions, which makes you no more truthful than the people who painted the false targets to start this problem.
"I've yet to try the mac mini on an apple only network, but interoperability with other machines such as my linux box is something I've given up on. It's quicker to send files with a USB key and all else I just work around."
Too true - there's "Apple Network" stuff integrated everywhere, but Finder can't seem to access any normal network files like FTP or SSH. It's like they assume you'll be using it in an exclusively mac network, but how likely is that?
The app which confuses me most is ichat -- they've got this chat program that doesn't seem to integrate with any messaging networks that people normally use. It has AOL for some odd reason, but not any of the usual suspects like IRC, Yahoo, MSN, or Jabber. Why spend so long writing an application with 2 protocols, rather than putting a new interface on gaim?
Slashdot Mirror
"936 people have signed up, 99064 more needed"
I think they're safe for now...
"I tried to install on a laptop, and it didn't work."
Windows and Linux get more similar every day... Wouldn't it be ironic if it was because the laptop manufacturer didn't care about any compatibility issues other than getting their "designed for Windows XP" certification.
"Could terrorists with a little knowledge and a few well-placed EMP generators disable major segments of the internet?"
You misspelled "backhoe"...
"But, for most businesses, [Linux] is no alternative to windows.""
Linux's license is easier to understand, costs less, with less documentation to keep track of. Lower TCO!
"Since I had never heard of the artist until Google used an interpretation of her art as its logo, this seems like it would be a good thing for artists."
These people aren't artists
The artist is dead, long live his monopoly on distribution!
or set your user-agent string to be a screen-reader or braille machine (and then use the US federal disability laws to make their life difficult when they ban you)
You're aware that Dell makes some fairly small laptops themselves, right?
This sort of thing? I've just been looking at Dell systems, and they seem quite heavy and expensive compared to Sharp ones.
"One woman recently came to light in the national press [for driving whilst applying makeup]"
Interesting story, not least because it shows that people who've been banned (after drink-driving, no less) are still on the roads and driving around.
This person only got caught because a policeman happened to notice her doing something stupid, but it makes you wonder how many of the other drivers are banned but ignoring it.
"Sorry, but I have to side with the IRS here. Everyone who isn't paying the taxes they're supposed to be deserves to be found out."
Even if that requires disclosing financial information on 96,000,000 people who were previously told that it would be held securely?
"All the Pixels around it were black except for one that was white"
Meanwhile, the manufacturers of Hubble respond that they won't repair it until another 3 dead pixels are found...
"Now either the PM is picking his home secretaries using some technique that selects for wannabe fascists"
Why would you spend your life trying to get a job where you can control what others do, if you don't enjoy controlling what others do?
Career politicians are self-selected to be authoritarian - the Home Office doesn't seem to be an isolated incident.
Paul Graham is wrong when he says, "if you are against software patents, you are against all patents".
While it does make some sense ("why should the first person to make a hammer be the only person allowed to make a hammer") it misses the obvious point that in hardware, you don't give away an infinte number of products for free.
That kind of messes-up the licensing issues, when you have something which can be duplicated and redistributed at no cost by anyone who receives it.
Paul Graham seems to be approaching from the POV of a startup company which just wants to exist long enough to sell the company in 3 years or less, with the fallback option of hiring lawyers, paying licenses, or cross-licensing if necessary once they have the money and patents to do so.
Many of the people on slashdot are doing something very different, trying to create a piece of software which will last essentially forever, be free for anyone to use without restriction, and with little or no "legal maintenance"
i.e. if you put down your GPL project, you expect to be able to come back to it in 20 years and find it still legally usable - that exposes one of the big problems with patents, that they make it so easy to destroy useful work.
So the essay seems like one answer of very limited-scope, to the wrong question, for most of us here.
"IOW, Clinton did this, not Bush. Remember Carnivore?"
What makes you think it's the president's idea? Surely the NSA does what the NSA does, regardless of the person who's theoretically supposed to be telling them what to do.
People who've watched Yes Minister will know what I mean.
Or if you've been watching the UK Home Office do its "ID cards" thing regardless of which figurehead is nominally in charge of the department. People used to say that it's all David Blunkett's fault, until he left and his old department of civil servants carried on doing exactly the same thing with a new "leader".
People blame one president for what the FBI, NSA, DHS, etc. are up to, and when that president leaves, it all continues as if nothing had changed. Aren't government bureaucracies the same, the world over?
If browsers started displaying metadata at the top of the page when rendering it, maybe people would get more embarassed about 1800-keyword pages and start using the tags sensibly...
"Because he helped START the open source movement"
He's the only person IN the open source movement, other than ESR...
Option 4: your automated fax machine recognises the blacklisted number, answers and hangs up, then automatically composes a new fax to whatever government representative you have in that godforsaken country, saying "I just received an unwelcome fax from w, this is the x'th junk fax in y days which has cost my business $z. Could you please campaign for laws to reduce the number of junk faxes I get?"
I found the perfect bags for anyone worried about thievery...
Start by getting a properly small laptop, rather then the "luggable" computers Dell make, then you can put it in a normal bag with room to spare...
"And that's the beauty of DRM: it will allow companies to continue to profit from their works even long after copyright has expired."
Which is why, since DRM publishers don't uphold the "public domain" end of the copyright bargain, neither should their readers uphold their "monopoly on copying" which was once used as payment for publishers' contributions to the public domain.
They want to play hardball? Fine. Make anything with DRM legal to copy the moment it's released - let publishers rely on encryption rather than law if that's what they want.
"The word "moron" fell out of medical use, as did imbecile and idiot because the term started getting abused by lay people."
By non-clergymen?
"if everyone aims at the bullseye, then the distribution I would expect would very much indicate where the bullseye is!"
So in our analogy, the bullseye is the truth, and the million darts are public opinion as represented by blogs. We think that by analysing enough opinions, we can do some statistics, find a peak or average, and discover the truth.
Problem is, imagine mapping public opinion onto the bullseye problem. The target would be obscured behind dense smoke, and there would be several brightly illuminated fake targets in other locations within the smoke.
It would be easy for someone outside the U.S. to joke that many of those fake targets are well off to the right hand side, but that's just an example.
As someone else mentioned, it all depends on whether people can recognise an idea that sounds plausible, even if that differs from the prevailing opinion, and espouse that view themselves. Such open-mindedness would only find local maxima (unless people did serious amounts of research before believing something), but at least it would narrow down the millions of views to a few clumps around valid ideas, which lets you read them all and judge.
But if people read them all, they might converge on just the correct answer, which implies that it's possible to agree on a correct answer. If it's not, then surely you stand no more chance than the crowd does, in choosing between the viewpoints correctly. Ultimately, you might end up with the best answer which fits your opinions, which makes you no more truthful than the people who painted the false targets to start this problem.
"If one throws a million darts at a dartboard, it's highly unlikely that none of them will hit the bullseye."
But can you tell where the bullseye is, by looking at the distribution of darts?
"Well, I consider 28 days better than 90"
It reminds me of that famous quote from a young girl:
"When you want a puppy, start by asking for a pony"
"I've yet to try the mac mini on an apple only network, but interoperability with other machines such as my linux box is something I've given up on. It's quicker to send files with a USB key and all else I just work around."
Too true - there's "Apple Network" stuff integrated everywhere, but Finder can't seem to access any normal network files like FTP or SSH. It's like they assume you'll be using it in an exclusively mac network, but how likely is that?
The app which confuses me most is ichat -- they've got this chat program that doesn't seem to integrate with any messaging networks that people normally use. It has AOL for some odd reason, but not any of the usual suspects like IRC, Yahoo, MSN, or Jabber. Why spend so long writing an application with 2 protocols, rather than putting a new interface on gaim?